The proposed research, to be carried out in a rural Quechua speaking village in Peru and duplicated amongst migrants from that village in Lima, is designed to test my major hypothesis that the acquisition of symbols is a transformational, orderly development displaying the major features noted for language acquisition - namely, overgeneralizations, avoidance of exceptions and the development of "semantic intentions". This hypothesis challenges Piaget's contention that symbolic thought is static and imitative and is in agreement with the view that symbolizing is a dynamic and transformational process. The basic assumption underlying the research design is that the acquisition of symbols is an outgrowth of general cognitive development. The research will provide the richest data ever collected on the acquisition of symbols through the use of video equipment to record both actions and verbage accompanying "play" enactments of select rituals. Children of three age groups will enact key rituals that I have found to embody the major organizational principles of identity, kinship, and social and ecological space under study. The participants will utilize folk art figurines manufactured by local artisans to enact the rituals, a procedure I found to be successful in previous language acquisition research. Adults' enactments will be compared with the children's. Furthermore, a select group of adults will view the children's dramatizations on tape and make judgements as to appropriateness and correctness. Such an elicitation procedure provides the data to construct a model of developmental stages of symbolic acquisition. In addition, the rural-urban comparisons will generate important data on acculturation processes.